Arts & Entertainment

Best Media Circus St. Louis 2005 - Premiere party for The Longest Yard

St. Louis isn't Hollywood, or New York, or even Sundance. We don't get a lot of movie premieres, so forgive us if we get a little excited when a film chooses to come to us for its unveiling. We'll concede that it was just an Adam Sandler movie (and a Sandler movie on the wrong side of Big Daddy at that), and we'll even agree that the only reason it swung through town was because Nelly did his hometown a solid and pulled some strings with the studio marketing people. Given all that, we were still out-of-our-minds stoked about the whole Longest Yard frenzy St. Louis whipped itself into. Updates on every local news broadcast, print journalists spilling ink for days in advance, and then the whole bleachers-and-paparazzi-and-entourages-and-bodyguards-and-afterparties thing on that magical Sunday afternoon? Frickin' sweet! A Playboy playmate was spotted, as was a bottom-feeding celebrity journalist from a basic-cable channel that goes by a single vowel, and Burt "Moustache" Reynolds walked the same sidewalk we stride every day. Awe-some. And, not to toot our own horns too much, but St. Louis did all right in our brush with Tinseltown. Mr. Reynolds didn't slap any uneducated interviewers here -- he popped that know-nothing hick in New York two days later.